A Few Acquaintances in a Big, Noisy City

Henry James has long been one of my personal passions. I’m not entirely sure why. He’s both hard to read and prolific, an irritating combination when just one of those distinctions can be annoying enough, but that challenge also appeals to my prideful side. I can say (with pride, yes) that I’ve read enough of James to know his work, but I can’t say I’ve read everything he’s written. Several times I have tackled one of his late-phase novels—The Golden Bowl, for example—and given up in complete frustration. It’s like the triathlon—you have to be ready. But I can say I’ve tried, just as I’ve tried to read Proust. I’ve read most of the tales and the early novels: Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady. I especially love The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square, and for a long time my favorite of the novels was The Bostonians. I read this many years ago in California and enjoyed it, but it took living in the East and seeing more of the world to develop a better understanding of and appreciation for the novel’s large subjects and themes. I’d be willing to bet that Claire Messud had The Bostonians at hand when she was writing her last novel, The Emperor’s Children. But I think I’ve a new favorite among the novels James wrote during this phase.
Like The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima was written in the 1880s. It’s a long novel, divided into six books. The hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is a bastard, the issue of a liaison between a nobleman and a courtesan. He lives in London in the mid-nineteenth century and falls in with some revolutionaries and radicals. He meets the title character, who has been converted to the revolutionary cause as well. The novel is lively, more energetic than one might give a writer like James credit for. Like The Bostonians, individual scenes and the overall story have the liveliness of a certain kind of Robert Altman film. Some of the secondary characters in The Bostonians, like Mrs. Birdseye, are as memorable as some of those in Nashville, like the Jeff Goldblum character, a magician who never says a word of dialogue. In The Princess Casamassima a number of personalities meet, connect, disconnect, and meet again. As in The Bostonians and Nashville, they are driven—sometimes together, sometimes apart—by purpose, ambition, cause. It’s remarkable that for the novel’s length, we don’t really meet more than two dozen characters, but we stay with them and close to them, while the teeming society they wish to change is this constant presence, with its implied constant motion, just beyond their garrets and parlors. I saw the new movie version of Sweeney Todd yesterday afternoon, and was aware of how Sondheim’s musical and Burton’s film version frame this pocket of people within a teeming city-society. Dickens has this aspect; I’m thinking of scenes in Great Expectations where the reader observes two characters in conversation, yet a lot of implied activity is going on in the street behind them. Middlemarch, one of my favorite reads of all time, has this as well. I feel like I know everything about mid-Victorian England by thoroughly knowing its four main characters. One contemporary novel that does this, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, goes even further I think, taking us so far into the lives of many, many individuals in the city of New York that rather than our having a sense of the blur beyond the immediate action, we have a sense of the main characters gradually dissolving into that blur.
I’d love to re-read The Princess Casamassima someday, but those other James volumes are lying in wait. The late Mr. Dwyer specialized in James; he has a complete hardcover set of the New York Edition and there they are, above my own paperbacks. Six volumes down, twenty to go.